Othello throws his wife
across the bed, pinning her tiny 5-foot-3 body against his 6-foot frame. He
grabs a pillow and smothers her face, muffling her screams. She thrashes, then
grows still.

Chalk up another one for
Iago.

By the end of
Shakespeare's magnificent tragedy that puts envy on a collision course with rage,
four characters are dead.

That's
not as many as Macbeth (10!), but still.

"God,
a lot of people get killed in this," says director Chris Coleman, whose
Portland Center Stage production opens April 11.

Blame
Iago, one of the best bad guys in theater. The role is the longest in the play,
third longest in Shakespeare's canon, after Hamlet and Richard III. It's also a
psychologically rich role, with modern dramatic equivalents. Think Anthony
Hopkins' Hannibal Lector and Bryan Cranston's Walter White.

A
sociopath, Iago is a seducer, a trickster – he's subversive, disruptive,
destructive -- eaten alive by jealousy because Othello, a Moorish general in
the Venetian army, failed to promote him. Iago's M.O. -- spinning webs for others
to walk into.

No
wonder it's a role so many actors yearn to play, including Portland native Gavin
Hoffman. With his shaved head and commanding bass voice, Hoffman looks and
sounds the part, darting around the stage like a snake uncoiled.

"It's
the meatiest Shakespeare I've done," Hoffman, 38, says at a recent rehearsal,
noting that Iago's malevolence has several dimensions. "He's on a righteous
quest. He's absolutely sincere. He's the most practical character in Shakespeare.
He doesn't get emotional. 'Is this working? Is that working? No, try this.' Iago
is playing chess and no one else knows the game has even started."

We know, of course.
Stories are told of audiences over the centuries rising from their seats and
shouting the truth at Othello, who doesn't hear, that Desdemona is faithful,
that Iago is his enemy, not his friend. Until the last act, no one on stage,
except Iago, knows what we know.

Iago
can be funny, too, Hoffman says. "He seduces them by making them laugh. I enjoy
his ability to tell a good story. He can take over a room. He's a good
listener. He brings up things later that he heard earlier."

Daver Morrison as Othello and Gavin Hoffman as Iago.Patrick Weishampel

Hoffman
has a few of these qualities himself, honed from tending bar in New York for 10
years while cobbling together an acting career. "I'm a really good bartender
because I can listen, and I'm funny. I know every joke there is to tell."

Hoffman,
who says his great-grandfather was the first pediatrician in Portland, caught
the acting bug at Wilson High School, making a bit of history, too. "Because of
me, you can letter in theater at Wilson," he says, explaining his successful
argument that if students could get letters for choir or sports, they should be
able to get one for theater.

In
1995, he graduated from the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in
Costa Mesa, Calif., an education he calls "rigorous." "It focused me. I saw how
hard people had to work to make it good."

In
1998, he got his B.F.A. in acting from New York's Ithaca College and interned
for a year at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. After 10 years in New
York, where he played Leonine in "Pericles" off-Broadway, as well as Berowne in
"Love's Labours Lost," and Orsino in "Twelfth Night," he moved back to Portland
in 2009. Since then, he has appeared as Dieter in Artist Repertory Theatre's
"The Monster-Builder," Karl/Steve in Center Stage's "Clybourne Park" and won a
2012 Drammy award in Shaking the Tree's "The Tripping Point."

But
Iago is a different challenge from anything he's played before. He leads others
to destroy themselves. He plants the seeds of doubt, without explicitly stating
them.